The Daily News. MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1914. THE PROHIBITION VOTE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 161, 14 December 1914, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1914. THE PROHIBITION VOTE.

•-■ .__ aa»-" ■ The most significant feature of the vote r on Prohibition at the recent ejections c seems to be the lack of anything like t I intense excitement on the subject in the i mind of the general public. There has f been no approach to the boom of enthu- t siasm in favor of Prohibition which I might have becu expected as the result i of the many fervid appeals that have I been made to brandish the burning torch. I In fact, so far as the returns show, there 1 seems to have been a decline rather than < an increase of interest in the crusade < against the traffic, in spite of the many < powerful attempts to swell its ranks and • quicken its march. Several causes have ; probably concurred to produce this ap- ■ parent indifference to a struggle into ' which the combatants on both sides have hitherto thrown such fervor. The first : of these is the fact that at the present moment the public mind is too full of excitement over the great war to have room to spare for enthusiasm on any other subject. It is scarcely possible for the public to take intense interest in two diuerent subjects at the same time. The white heat to which our minds are raised by our interest in the war which is to determine the destiny of the Empire is too enthralling to allow any other interest to rise beyond summer | heat. We also think that the interest in the subject has been cooled by the division of the mind between the two issues set before the electors, viz., local ) Prohibition and national Prohibition. | Evidently many of the electors were so j bewildered by trying to think about I these two different aspects of Prohibition at the same time that in the end ' they hardly knew their own minds on J cither of them. The secret of all enthusiasm is concentration. If local Pro-1 hibition iiad been eliminated from con- ' sideration altogether, and the minds of the electors concentrated solely on the question of national Prohibition, the vote would probably have been far more decisive. But these are, after all, only superficial and minor considerations. There is a growing resentment in the. public mind of to-day against any attempt to dictate its decision upon complicated controversial questions. The effort to force a man's decision invari- | ably tends to defeat itself. It has been • said that to tell a young lady that there is a wicked man staying in the house with whom she is on no account to think of falling in love is the surest way to make her fall in love with him. And there are thousands of persons who are more likely to be repelled from Prohibition by the attempt to drive them to vote for it than they are to be won over to its side. Moreover, there are many persons of sound judgment and high sense of honor who repudiate the attempt to identify abhorrence of intemperance with the determination to suppress the liquor traffic. Of course, every sane mind must admit that the existence of the open bar is a terrible temptation to the weak. But a man may believe that, and yet believe that it is a finer thing to try to strengthen the weak than it is to try to abolish the temptation. It is said that Lord Roberts once saw a young Territorial coming out of a 'public-house, when lie touched him kindly on the shoulder, and said: "I don't like to see our uniform inside those places." Such an appeal would be far more likely to save a man than the attempts to close the hotel door in his face. Many years ago Sir William Fox, in his opening address as President of i the Alliance, said: "If we cannot get the ■ man away from the drink, we must take; the drink away from the man." There Is, of course, mucli force in that argument. But it is utterly unjust to brand as foes to, temperance those who prefer to say: ".Whether we can take the drink! away from the man or not, we can, and ' "will, get the man away from the drink." There's a fine moral underlying the old classical legend that when Ulysses was sailing past the Syren's island, he stopped the ears of his sailors with wax to drown the sound of the Syrens' song, but that when Orpheus was sailing past the same island he took up his own'; lyre and played on it so sweetly that; his sailors became insensible to the'' charm of the voices of the Syrens. He- ': pression often fails. Inspiration never ' does. The surest way to destroy the* craving for coarse pleasures is to instil t into the soul the love of pure ones. The man who is enamoured by the love of art, the fascination of science, who is absorbed and thrilled by the love of philanthropic work, will be armed against the glamour of intemperance and all other sensual indulgences. All honor to those who are trying in whatever way they think right to abolish the temptations to which their fellow-crea-tures are exposed. But equal honor is due to those who have more faith in the effort to kill the demand for indulgence i than in that to out off the supply. The failure of the attempt to cure intemperance by legislative suppression is the strongest of all incentives to more determined cfl'orts than ever to make men temptation-proof.